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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Millennials, people born roughly between 1981 and 1996, roughly 24 to 39 years old today, are the first American generation not to be doing better economically on average than their parents. The economic shock of coronavirus is at least the third of millennials' lifetimes, after 9/11 and the 2008 financial crisis, not to mention structural changes, including more being forced to take student loans to go to college and other things.

Let's talk now about millennials in relation to your parents and older parents in relation to your millennials with Jill Filipovic. She's a lawyer, a writer. Maybe you know her previous well-known book, The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. She's got a new book called OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Jill, thanks so much for coming on today. Welcome to WNYC.

Jill Filipovic: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian: Let's start with that student debt. In the book, you say 61% of millennials have gone to college, and close to half hold a post-secondary degree, but only about a quarter of boomers hold a four-year degree. What is the difference in college education level mean in the grand scheme of things, and how does it relate to debt?

Jill: Millennials were told from the time we were young, that going to college really was our ticket to a good life, a stable middle-class life. More of us went to college than any previous generation. We are the best-educated adults in America. What also happens is that for boomers, a college degree met higher incomes. By the time millennials were hitting adulthood, the wages had really dropped out of working-class jobs, which meant that you needed a college degree not to move up the ladder, but just to maintain a toehold into the middle-class.

Millennials also paid more for those degrees. The average millennial who has student debt owes $33,000 on a student loan, even by our early 30s, the average millennial owes about $15,000 whereas boomers in their early 30s owed more like $2,300. We're better educated, but that's not translating into higher incomes, and it has meant significant debt.

Brian: The $2,300 that boomers owed at that age compared to $33,000 for millennials, that's all in today's dollars. That is an apples-to-apples comparison as I see in your book.

Jill: Yes, exactly.

Brian: Like many things in the US, part of the heart of your story is about race. You say because millennials are a more diverse generation, we are a poor generation. Is that something older people tend to understand or not understand so well from your findings? Is this something you see being fixed by diversity or what's your relation to that issue?

Jill: The fact that millennials are the most racially diverse adult generation in America completely impacts our poor prospects. Millennials are only about 56% White. Gen Zeers who are coming up behind us, are more diverse still. Systemic American racism has made it so that families of color and Black families, in particular, have historically been less able to buy houses, less able to build the family wealth that ripples through generations.

We're really seeing that now come home to roost for millennials, where you have families of color, who because they didn't have the same wealth as White families, made it so that their children were more likely to have to take on educational debt, or more likely to have to work through college, which means that you have higher college dropout rate. Then ongoing discrimination in pay and hiring means that those same students of color once they graduate are facing a job market where they're going to be paid less than their White counterparts even having the same degrees. When you look at the generation-wide statistics for millennials and all of the challenges we face, yes, this is something that most millennials have experienced, but our more diverse generation also means that millennials of color have faced even more extreme challenges.

Brian: Let's take something on the personal side before we start to weave all these things together and talk about where they came from and how to get out of this. When it comes to having friends, your book finds that millennials are much more likely than boomers or Gen Xers to say they have no friends. You said 22% of millennials, but just 14% of Gen Xers and just 9% of boomers listed the number of friends they have as zero. Zero, Jill?

Jill: I was shocked by that as well. We think of millennials as these social creatures, right? We're on social media. We are posting our beautiful vacations and experiences on Instagram. We know that millennials are more likely than previous generations to live in big dynamic, exciting cities. Along with that, goes a whole set of assumptions about millennial social life.

What I found is unfortunately just not true. That we often hear the statistics that millennials are more likely to live with their parents than young people in previous generations. That actually is true. I do think that part of that means that when we're not able to have-- We're not employed at the same rate as previous generations. The average millennial at 25 had more education, but was more likely to be unemployed than the average Gen X or a boomer at 25.

We really see our future opportunities stymied. We're a generation that although we're optimistic, we've been hitting many walls. I think what happens there is you see a lot of millennials who really retreat, who spend a lot of time online, who spend a lot of time inside and who aren't making those really crucial connections with other human beings that we need, which is why you see 22% of Millennials saying they have no friends, and a similar number are saying they don't even have any acquaintances outside of their immediate family.

Brian: Let's open up the phones. Millennials considering Jill's book, Jill Filipovic's book, you get the phones in this segment, whether you want to address your baby boomer parents [chuckles] and talk about your situations to them or just address each other, or whoever may be out there right now. How much of this is hitting home with you economically, socially, culturally? Do you blame somebody? Do you blame your baby boomer parents for screwing it up for you when they could have made it better for you?

The chance, the randomness of huge events in the world like 9/11, and the 2008 financial crisis, and the coronavirus right now, not that those are all random. Certainly, at least some of those could have been prevented by good policy. Millennials, what are you relating to here? What do you need? (646) 435-7280. (646) 435-7280. If you're in any other generation, boomers, Gen X, younger people, Gen Z, it's everybody else's chance to listen to millennials who are going to call in, in addition to our millennial guest, the author, Jill Filipovic, author now of OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. (646) 435-7280. (646) 435-7280.

This is as, I think, is already clear to the listeners, just from hearing you so far, a deeply analytical book about many things having to do with different groups of people in the millennial generation, roughly 24 to 39 years old right now. The title makes it sound like you're blaming the parents. OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Why did you give it an OK Boomer title?

Jill: I do kind of blame boomers, [chuckles] to be honest. Part of the goal of the book was not just to say boomers are bad. It was really to open up a conversation about, how did we get here? First of all, what is the landscape of challenges millennials face? Those challenges are significant. Not only are we the first generation that won't do better than our parents, but we're not going to do better than our grandparents. If not, for the social welfare system, millennials would be the most impoverished young adults since those who came of age during the great depression. Things are very bleak.

In order to understand how we came to this moment, we need to dig in and look at, what political choices were made before millennials were born, and when millennials were young that shaped our trajectories? What was different for baby boomers who were the most, and continue to be the most prosperous generation in American history? Part of that was looking at, how did baby boomers vote? What did baby-boomer-elected politicians do? Why did boomers have this ladder to climb up into the middle class? Then what decisions were made to tear the rungs off for their millennial children?

Brian: Name one big one that you'd like to single out from what they--

Jill: The election of Ronald Reagan. [laughs]

Brian: Go ahead.

Jill: Ronald Reagan was the first boomer-elected president. He obviously wasn't a boomer himself, but he came in on a wave of young baby-boomer voters. What you really see is that Ronald Reagan's presidency is a major turning point in nearly every challenge that millennials face. For example, health care. 1980 is the year when you see American health care costs begin to skyrocket, and you see American health outcomes begin to level off and then decline. The opposite happens in our Western European counterparts. You see costs start to level off, and you see how their health care outcomes get better. We pay more and we have worse outcomes beginning in 1980.

1980 is also when you start seeing a rapid uptick in education costs. When you start seeing educational grants losing funding, and you start seeing loans being increasingly relied upon for young people trying to go to school. So much of what millennials face was put in place by Reagan, including this hyper-individualism and it's turned to the obligation of the individual and the family to provide for their own. We're not going to create a more generous landscape to make sure that every American can thrive.

Brian: I think we have a caller on exactly that last point. Let's see what Derek in Brooklyn has to say. Derek, you're on WNYC. Thanks so much for calling in.

Derek: Hey. Thanks, Brian. I really love that you just touched on Reagan and this feeling of hyper-individualism. I think the whole American dream aspirational model worked as long as the next generation kept aspiring and succeeding based on the work of their parents and grandparents, and then all of a sudden it didn't work out so well. Now that these millennials, myself included, are having a harder time finding our footing. They want to be all individualistic about it, where it's like, "Hey, this is your own personal failing, not a failing of our accesses or of our lack of morality."

Brian: Derek, thank you very much. We're going to continue on this because a few people are calling with exactly this point, and they were calling before Jill made it. This is obviously something that's out there. John in Belmore. You're on WNYC. Hi, John.

John: Hey, how are you doing there?

Brian: Good. What are you thinking?

John: I have to fight my college professor here, Suzanne Mettler. She wrote a book called The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy. Why there are Americans so unaware of the government social benefits that they had in the past? Why did they become hostile to them later in life? For example, people in the boomer generation have had access to the GI Bill. They've had housing credits. They've had numerous benefits over the years that either were not really advertised to them or just not made clear to them.

I think perhaps part of the solution here is getting people to understand that they didn't really bootstrap themselves. It really wasn't that they worked harder than we did. They had a lot of help along the way, and we need to make policies that pave the way for the next generation, and hopefully, us too.

Brian: John, thank you so much. Let's go next to Angelic in Oakland. Angelic, you're on WNYC. Thanks for calling today.

Angelic: Hi, Brian. Thank you for taking my call. I love listening. I always listen, whether I'm in New York or in California.

Brian: Thank you so much.

Angelic: I heard what your speaker was saying about Reagan and it really does all go back to Reagan. He made sure that all of these policies that made sure the top earners at these big companies were able to make insane amounts compared to the bottom men which were made intentionally, I think in the 40s or 50s. There was regulations that he rolled back intentionally.

Ever since then, the median salary hasn't changed. What my parents made when they were 30 is what I make. That's insane. That was 30 years ago. What? That was 30 years ago and we haven't changed salaries at all. When you talk about the wealth not changing, I don't even think it has. Diversity really doesn't factor into it. What factors into it is that we are making peanuts and inflation goes up.

Brian: Angelic, thank you so much. Let me take one more, Jill, and then we'll get a closing thought or two from you before we run out of time. Shahrazad in Bushwick. You're on WNYC. Hello, Shahrazad.

Shahrazad: Hey, Brian. I was just going to say that it was insane to me. I'm a millennial. I graduated college almost 10 years ago. None of my friends had jobs that could pay. We all got paid around $30,000 a year right out of college if we were able to find a job. Most of my friends had like two jobs and our student loans were like $800 a month, plus you had to pay rent, plus you had to pay your bills and it was just a really rude awakening. I guess I don't fully know but I don't think the boomers really had that same experience of just being thrown out into the world and having so much debt

Brian: Shahrazad, thank you very much. Where would you like to enter, Jill, on any of those callers or the set? There are definitely some themes that run through them.

Jill: I certainly resonate to hear many other millennials say, "I'm struggling." I felt like it was only me and I'm now realizing that this hyper-individualism of American society has held me back, that there was this invisible hand of government helping boomers and that's been radically scaled back. One statistic that sticks with me from the book is that millennials are now the largest adult generation in America. We're 22% of the US population and yet we hold only 3% of American wealth. When boomers were our age, they held 21% of the country's wealth.

There really is a significant difference, not just in what millennials have been able to make income-wise although there's a huge gap there as well, but in terms of things like home-ownership. At the same time, a tremendous amount of Americans today work almost an extra month per year compared to how much Americans were working in 1980. US GDP has increased by I think around 79% also since 1980 and yet none of that is going back into millennials pocket. I think a huge reason for that is that you look at who is in charge. The US Senate, 80% of senators are over the age of 55, 0% are under the age of 40. There isn't a single millennial in the Senate.

When boomers were in their 30s, there were baby-boomer senators. Millennials have really systematically been shut out of American power and American wealth-building. I think if we want things to change, if we want a brighter future not just for millennials but for Gen Zeers and for all of our children, we need to get millennials into positions of power and boomers have to be willing to hand over the reins.

Brian: I think we've seen even just in the last few months since the police killing of George Floyd, something that may have been starting to break out anyway, you tell me, on the part of millennials and Gen Z people. Compared to boomers, is there's more community-oriented sense. There's more context-oriented sense of their place in the world. There seems to be so much mutual aid now, so much talk about individual privilege which has to do with race, which has to do with gender, which has to do with this idea that your success is a matter of what you did as an individual and not as it really is by context. It seems to me that what you brought up, what the callers brought up, is a central part of the movement that we've seen much more on display in the last few months. What do you think?

Jill: I think that's absolutely right. Millennials are very much a community-oriented generation. I think that's true for Gen Xers as well. As much as we get made fun of for being these sensitive PC snowflakes, in reality, millennials are pretty kind, decent people generationally. What I found from interviewing a ton of millennials from this book and reading a lot of the social science research, is that we really overwhelmingly do say that we want the world to be a better place and we want to do good in it.

We've seen the failure of this hyper-individual system. We realized that no individual does make it alone. Somebody has to build the roads, somebody has to help create the ladder up into the middle class. That putting it on all of us as individuals to get there has been a spectacular failure which is why many of us are now looking toward other better solutions that will help raise all boats, rather than just hyper-consolidate resources into the hands of the luckiest few.

Brain: Jill Filipovic's new book is called OK Boomer, Let's Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind. Thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Jill: Thanks so much for having me on, Brian.

Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Coming up next, we'll discuss an under-discussed group for whom Kamala Harris's nomination as vice president.

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